My Campaign for Daily Creativity

This is a call to action! If you share my beliefs about Creativity, please reach out. I would love to hear from you!

This is something I believe with all my heart: Creativity is fundamentally human. It’s a set of muscles we’re all born with, though each of us has a different way of exercising and engaging them. 

Creativity is generative and applies to anything we work hard to bring into being; anything that wouldn’t have existed without our dedicated efforts.

It doesn’t need to be a (brilliant) work of art. It could be an event you plan for a friend, a nutritious meal you make for a neighbor, a thank you card you write to your local librarian ... you name it!

Creativity comes from deep within the human heart; It is how we spin the hurt of being human into love, care, courage, generosity and joy that we insist on sharing with others.

What we don’t hear often enough - in my opinion - is that when we create, the point is not so much the product of our efforts as it is the practice of engaging and investing that effort at all.

The point is that we are growing and strengthening the musculature of love, care, courage, generosity and joy - all of which go into the act of making - in a way that ripples out into every aspect of our lives, and the lives of those around us.

When Creativity is alive in us, so is a loving, caring way of seeing and being in the world, and with each other.

Over the past year, as part of a Masters Thesis project at the Rhode Island School of Design's (RISD's) department of Teaching + Learning in Art + Design, I did a bit of a deep dive into exactly what Creativity is. 

I looked at how Creativity shows up in human history: Anthropologists like Agustin Fuentes (author of The Creative Spark) have established that Creativity is essential to our flourishing, both individually and as a species. 

I looked at what (neuro)scientists are learning about a multitude of positive processes that take place in our brains and bodies when we are in a creative - or, “flow” - state. Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, authors of Your Brain on Art put it this way:

"[So] what if, instead of scrolling on your phone with your morning coffee, you spent 20 minutes drawing in a doodle diary? See how it changes your mood. The list is endless and the results are immediate."

A slew of academic sources support what has been my own personal experience: that Creativity is a key ingredient to a sense of possibility and potential, and to an overall sense of health and well-being. 

Now, in a world where health and well-being are a hot topic, and often feel hard to come by, my question is: Should we step back and examine the incredible harm being caused by a culture that runs on consumer behavior - and by that I mean consumption of material and media that negatively affect our emotional and relational states, as well as our planet - and take a closer look at what I believe might be a happier, healthier, more sustainable alternative: one centered around creative behavior? 

Anthropologist Agustin Fuentes says that Creativity is the fundamental human ability to “dream things up and make them happen.”

If this isn’t the kind of world we dreamed of living in, what is?

I think the pandemic has had a longer tail than we realize, conditioning us to accept and adapt to events that feel beyond our control. But now, we can snap out of its spell and consider whether we want/need to keep consuming the world that’s currently on offer …

Or, dig in, engage, invest, care and love enough to create a better one - together.

One of the things that troubles me most about today's culture is that it pits us against each other in competition, when - for the sake of our future flourishing - we will need to learn to be creative collaborators. I really believe that, if we were to look up from our screens, into each other’s eyes and ask: “Hey, what’s your life’s dream?”, we would be reminded that our deepest desires - to create a life of love and purpose, meaning and service to something beyond the self - are fundamentally human, something we all have in common.

When we encourage each other to exercise Creativity, it is not as competitors pitted against one another in a battle for scarce resources, but as a community where each individual has a unique contribution to make. In the process - in the practice - we create a world that reflects the beauty and the bounty of which the collective human imagination is capable.

This is a very different way of teaching and learning and being in the world - together. We see that this way, of strengthening the individual to be a unique contributor to the whole, and strengthening the whole to support the unique contribution of the individual, is successful elsewhere in Nature. But it's hard for us, because we can't test, measure or standardize Creativity. And because we have been conditioned and socialized to see the world in terms of scarcity, rather than abundance.

But human Creativity truly is abundant, and grows when it is tended to.

Among other things, Creativity is a sense of agency, a sense that we can influence our circumstances. It’s empowering and life-affirming. It is an act of love and generosity. It’s something we’re all born with, and it connects us deeply in collaborative labor - in the ability to build things, to care for and to repair them. No one and nothing is disposable. 

Creativity demands our attention, our hard work, our long-term commitment and our active engagement - even when things get hard and don’t go our way.

I want to campaign for Creativity as a way of being and believing - in our classrooms, communities and culture as a whole. By taking Creativity into our lives, in a series of small daily acts, we can benefit, individually and collectively, from its healing powers. In this way, small decisions, like spending 20 minutes a day on a postcard-sized piece of art, can be the beginning of very, very big changes. This, on the individual - and the societal - level.

I’m so happy to say that this Fall I’ll be able to continue my Campaign for (Daily) Creativity, thanks to a grant from RISD’s Graduate Commons. My hope is to formulate and share a better understanding of the value of Creativity and its implications for our health and well-being. Additionally, I’ll be working to develop actual tools to help individuals and groups establish and maintain their own habit of daily engagement with Creativity.

If this is something you, your friends, your team or organization are interested in diving into with me, please feel free to reach out to me directly. I would love to hear from you!